I got two letters in one day yesterday, from the same person. I tore through them at the kitchen table, then read them again in bed, then re-read them this afternoon before writing a response to them. I added to the response to an envelope already thick with unsent letters—I have a thing about sending a lot at once, rather than one at a time—and then sealed it and dropped it in the box close to my bus stop.
I’ve been thinking about letters and what they mean to me recently—and ways that other forms of communication enhance or replace letter writing in my life. We talked about The Story of Margaretta (and my professor did call it the story of margarita at one point), where the male narrator shares the letters of all the women he comes into contact, including his adopted daughter Margaretta. Everyone writes tons of letters in this book (and every pre-telephone novel); Margaretta and her mother write letters to each other when they are in the house together to better explore their feelings. In my area of study, letters are incredibly important modes of communication that are often incorporated into the text itself, or enter into the metanarrative of serialized fiction, etc. So in a way, I’m just reading and writing letters all day every day.
I became friends with one of my closest old friends through letter writing: because he didn’t have internet or particularly like sharing the phone with his family, we wrote each other massive amounts of letters that we sent through the mail even though we went to the same high school. I dropped a packet of letters that I had written him every three or four days into the mailbox before I left for school. I learned about the fallout of his parents not wanting us to be friends because I was queer through a letter from him. I kept all of them until we split: the moment our friendship ended was when he hit me in my sorest spot—he told me he’d been humoring me the whole time with the letter writing thing and after I had gone to college he didn’t really intend to keep up with it. I remember untying the purple ribbon I had bound all our letters in and burning them in the backyard—like I had burned the memorabilia, notes, and notebooks of letters given to me by my first love, a girl with sandy hair and a heart-shaped face who put me through the ringer.
The most memorable first letter I remember writing was one I wrote after a woman I had a crush on in college said in class that Casaubon’s letter to Dorothea in Middlemarch was so absurd and dry that she would feel compelled to commit to anyone who wrote her a letter like that. So I wen to my dorm kitchen that night and dyed a piece of printer paper with tea and rewrote the letter casting me as Casaubon and her as Dorothea when it was dry. I put it in her mailbox myself because until I was a senior, we didn’t lock our mailboxes at Agnes—we just left them open.
I blame all these passionate epistolary pick-up attempts on my Aries Moon (and maybe my Venus in Gemini). Though email certainly lends a more instantaneous response from the recipient, there is nothing quite as gratifying to me as reading over a letter for errors and then sealing it in an envelope. There’s no turning back once you’ve done that—you either send it or you don’t.
And of course, I came out to my parents via a handwritten letter, and my mom and I have it out over letters most of the time—quite like Margaretta and her adopted mother.
All this is to ask, what do letters mean? especially now, when I can overshare with any random stranger whenever I want (like now)?
Perhaps like serial fiction, letters beg for you to respond, and for the writer to respond in turn, until there is a clear ending. Maybe it’s the time thing—if you send a letter to someone you love or even just like, as long as the chance they’ll write back remains, you know they’re out there somewhere, with some fragment of you, unless they destroy it. Time stands still till you get a answer—or at least slows somewhat. Anxiety grows but hope doesn’t fade until the letter is returned unread, or stamped “deceased.”
Maybe, like in 18th century more-privileged, generally-white American lives, writing letters (and in general) is still an explicit performance of the self, a way to make those boundaries of response that we use to form a self stick, possibly forever. Yeah, yeah, death of the author and whatnot, but I just had to read Ben Franklin’s autobiography again and while that’s boring, the letters of his friends that he reprinted mean they’ll never really go away, never dissipate totally into the nameless ether of the past, all because they wrote Ben a letter that stroked his ego enough that he felt compelled to include it in his autobiography.
I suppose that’s the sinister slant of self-by-post, though: as poor Margaretta and all of her friends learn, when you send a letter to another, it leaves your hands forever, leaks into another person’s life, gathers in the corners of their closet. Letters are hidden, re-read, kissed, slipped into pockets, left on the bus, doused with coffee or beer. Or burned, ignored, shredded, unanswered, cried on, recycled.
You don’t get letters back. if you write them by hand you can never pore over what you said when it all falls apart—just the echoes of your old words if you even keep those responses. And you never know where they’ll end up no matter how well it shakes out—as cooling, dew-damp ash in the backyard of a house in rural Tennessee, pressed between the yellowed pages of an old copy of Moby Dick in an underwear drawer, or tied up in grosgrain ribbon in the most secret place a person has.
